Edmonton officers helping train recruits
By Jim Farrell, The Edmonton Journal (Edmonton, Alberta, Canada)
MOWAQQAR, Jordan -- At a training camp on the windswept desert outside this market town, two
Edmonton police officers are seeing first-hand the deep ethnic, religious and
political divisions that make policing Iraq such a difficult and daunting task.
On temporary leave from the Edmonton Police Service, Staff Sgt. Brian Readman and Det. Ed Willis instruct Iraqi
recruits at a sprawling police academy, part of an international effort to
re-establish basic services and infrastructure in war-shattered Iraq.
Readman and Willis are here to teach recruits how to survive in the fractious, turbulent country they will help police within a few weeks.
There are times when that turbulence spills over into the school itself. Two weeks ago, on the eve of a large Shiite
religious festival, angry words were exchanged between Shiite and Sunni
recruits. Students were soon brawling. Within hours some classes were cancelled as 300 students pitched rocks at each other in a nearby field.
“Camp security broke them up and sent them packing,” says David Butt, a retired RCMP superintendent who is chief trainer at the school. “We read them the riot act but I understand what was going on. In the past, Shiites weren’t allowed to celebrate their religious festivals, so this was part and parcel of that.”
Socially, ethnically and temperamentally, the International Police Training Centre mirrors Iraq. It helps prepare graduates for the violence they will face when they return home to take up their duties.
Most police recruits who trained under Readman and Willis in Edmonton go through their entire careers without pulling their guns or firing shots in anger. Recruits who do eight weeks at the training centre go on the firing line the moment they return to Iraq.
Police officers are favoured targets of the growing insurgency inside Iraq.
“When I look into that sea of faces, it just breaks my heart to know that some of them are going into that hornet’s nest,” says Willis, who volunteered for a six-month training hitch in Jordan because his children are grown and he wanted to expand his horizons.
The school, 10 kilometres from the market town of Mowaqqar, seems tranquil when approached by car along the highway that runs from the Jordanian capital of Amman to the Iraqi border. A former air force base, the school’s old hangars and shiny new prefabricated buildings sprawl across flat terrain where goat-cropped grassland blends into the gravel and sand of Jordan’s eastern desert.
The school is in the eye of a storm.
The Iraqi border is 250 kilometres to the northeast. Amman, with its large anti-American Palestinian population, is 45 kilometres to the northwest.
Saudi Arabia, birthplace of 16 of the 19 men who piloted planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon two-and-a-half years ago, is 100 kilometres to the east. Israel’s occupied territories are 100 kilometres to the west.
“We’re at centre ice in the Mideast,” Willis points out.
To discourage problems and protests, no signs indicate the school’s use or purpose. Jordan’s autocratic government discourages mention of the school in media reports. More than half the country’s population is Palestinian, and Palestinians oppose any co-operation with Iraq’s American-supervised provisional authority.
The International Police Training Centre is staffed by 150 instructors from Jordan, the United States, Britain, Canada, Sweden, Finland and Austria.
Canada sent 20 instructors, drawn from the RCMP, the Ontario Provincial Police and police forces in Montreal, Toronto, Quebec City, Edmonton and Cape Breton. Over the next two years, the school will graduate 32,000 police officers from recruits selected by the U.S.-supervised Iraqi coalition provisional government.
The first class of 500 recruits graduated in January. The second class graduated this week. Some recruits from that first class may already be dead.
When a suicide bomber detonated an explosive-packed vehicle outside an Iraqi police station in Kirkuk on Feb. 23 and killed a dozen officers, rumours circulated at the school that recent graduates were among the dead. The rumours were never confirmed.
The Kirkuk dead -- mainly Kurds -- were mourned by some recruits at the training centre and dismissed by others who are antagonistic to Iraq’s Kurdish minority.
In their classes, Willis and Readman see little ethnic strife. It’s strictly business for recruits who spend four weeks learning the theory of policing, then another four weeks practising the skills.
“We teach officer safety,” Willis says.
“That includes how to do vehicle stops and searches,” says Readman, “driver training, defensive tactics, how to deal with disturbances and the principles of shoot/don’t shoot.”
Willis and Readman also teach attitude adjustment. Traditionally, policing in Iraq involved bullying and intimidation. Instructors discourage that. They prefer a firm but respectful approach to law enforcement. Bullying is symptomatic of insecurity. It demonstrates a lack of faith in society, says Willis.
“It’s the difference between fear and faith. We try to dissipate fear among our students and instil in them a faith in the future of their country.
“To do that, we build self-esteem. They need to have their self-esteem boosted. It works. I notice that when we praise them, they just beam -- they want to be noticed.”
To build self-esteem and confidence, instructors repeatedly drill recruits in classic police tactics. Sometimes such tactics, used by police forces around the world, resemble traditional strong-arm tactics. In a gymnasium, officer Scott Hutchings, of Libby, Mont., demonstrates “pain compliance.” Today’s move calls for the officer to grab a suspect from behind and put pressure on his neck to force him to do the officer’s bidding. Hutchings demonstrates the painful hold on Morgan Winterbom, a Swedish police officer and instructor.
“It’s not fatal,” Hutchings tells two dozen students through an interpreter. “You won’t kill him, but it’s a great distraction and his brain may shut down for a second. His hearing will stop working, which means we need to give loud, verbal commands.
“It’s going to take his brain a second to hear what we’re telling him. Any questions?”
There are no questions. This looks like fun.
On a stretch of blacktop near the gymnasium, three students practise a take-down after pulling over a car. As a recruit playing the role of the driver kneels on the pavement, hands over his head, another prepares to search him as a third holds the suspect at “gunpoint.” There is no gun. The recruit simply grasps his hands together and points a finger. Readman notices something wrong in the position of the recruit’s hands, walks over and rearranges his fingers.
“He’s holding his hands as if he has his finger on the trigger,” says Readman. “That’s not what you do. When you’re pointing a gun, you keep your finger outside the trigger guard until there’s an immediate threat.
“It only takes an instant to move your finger, but it prevents accidental discharges.”
Traditional policing stresses the importance of preventing accidental shootings. That can involve mental training as well as firearms techniques.
“Emotionally, a police officer should be in what we call the yellow state of alertness,” says Willis. “White is where you’re far too relaxed, just wiped out. At orange, you’re more dangerous. At red you’re no longer thinking -- you’ve already determined your reaction. In our courses, we try to explain that emotional continuum.”
Being hyper-alert may cause an over-reaction. It can also lead to burnout says Readman.
“If you function at that level for a long period of time, say three hours, you end up back at white.”
Instructors at the school would not allow a reporter to interview recruits, who must learn to walk the fine line between hyper-alert and complacency.
There’s no room for complacency in Iraqi policing. On Feb. 25, militants assassinated the deputy police chief of Mosul, then warned of further attacks on security forces.
“Anyone who supports and co-operates with the infidels will be under threat of death,” the Mujahedeen Brigades announced in leaflets distributed to police stations. The leaflets threatened further attacks on police checkpoints and warned “we know all these (security) forces’ movements.”
Today, Iraq’s new police recruits are learning to fight back. Thirty-five recruits are honing their marksmanship under the supervision of Const. Leah Benham Grundstad, a Toronto police officer. Grundstad wears body armour, in case someone’s pistol goes off when it’s not supposed to.
Her training involves safety as much as marksmanship. A gun is a tool whose first purpose is to stop a threat, says officer Andrew Raney, a Virginia state trooper who works with Grundstad.
“We teach them to shoot to stop the threat, not to kill,” Raney says. “At that point, they give first aid to whoever they’ve shot. They’re having trouble wrapping their heads around that one.”